Long term evolution (“LTE”) of the Third Generation Partnership Project (“3GPP”), also referred to as 3GPP LTE, refers to research and development involving the 3GPP LTE Release 8 and beyond, which is the name generally used to describe an ongoing effort across the industry aimed at identifying technologies and capabilities that can improve systems such as the universal mobile telecommunication system (“UMTS”). The goals of this broadly based project include improving communication efficiency, lowering costs, improving services, making use of new spectrum opportunities, and achieving better integration with other open standards. The 3GPP LTE project produces new standards as well as standards recommendations for the UMTS.
The evolved universal terrestrial radio access network (“E-UTRAN”) in 3GPP includes base stations providing user plane (including packet data convergence protocol/radio link control/medium access control/physical (“PDCP/RLC/MAC/PHY”) sublayers) and control plane (including radio resource control (“RRC”) sublayer) protocol terminations towards wireless communication devices such as cellular telephones. A wireless communication device or terminal is generally known as user equipment (also referred to as “UE”). A base station is an entity of a communication network often referred to as a Node B or an NB. Particularly in the E-UTRAN, an “evolved” base station is referred to as an eNodeB. For details about the overall architecture of the E-UTRAN, see 3GPP Technical Specification (“TS”) 36.300 v8.7.0 (2008-12), which is incorporated herein by reference. For details of the radio resource control management, see 3GPP TS 25.331 v.9.1.0 (2009-12) and 3 GPP TS 36.331 v.9.1.0 (2009-12), which are incorporated herein by reference.
As wireless communication systems such as cellular telephone, satellite, and microwave communication systems become widely deployed and continue to attract a growing number of users, there is a pressing need to accommodate a large and variable number of communication devices transmitting a growing range of communication applications with fixed communication resources and limited portable battery energy storage capability. In current cellular communication systems, channel quality measurement data may be collected and reported on a continuing basis to a respective serving base station by the user equipment in connected (active) mode. In an idle mode (no dedicated radio connection with network established), the user equipment may collect and store quality measurement data internally in local memory and upload it later to the network (e.g., when a dedicated radio connection is established). One of the problems with user equipment collection and reporting of measurement data is the impact on user equipment processing and battery and memory consumption, as well as the impact on the network-signaling load. A parallel need is for the network to carefully select the user equipment for specific measurements for network management. Measurements in a user equipment connected mode are performed more often than measurements in an idle mode. Measurements from user equipment moving with high speed are less accurate than measurements made from user equipment at low speed. Currently, especially in an idle mode, the network has limited visibility of detailed user equipment mobility characteristics, so it is unable to precisely control the collection of measurements based on this information.
The current 3GPP specifications do not specify a process or method related to controlling or filtering the collection or reporting of measurements in relation to the current state of user equipment mobility. In terms of selecting user equipment for specific measurements, the 3GPP state of the art currently proposes static user equipment capability reporting, but does not dynamically identify a mobility aspect of the user equipment for controlling the acquisition, storage and reporting of measurement data.
In view of the growing deployment of communication systems such as cellular communication systems, it would be beneficial to control acquisition, storage and reporting of measurement data by user equipment to a base station to enable more efficient utilization of computing resources by the user equipment, and to enable more efficient utilization of communication resources by the communication system and network. Therefore, what is needed in the art is an apparatus, method and system that avoids the deficiencies of known communication systems for acquisition and reporting of measurement data by user equipment to the communication system and network to improve utilization of communication resources and improve the utilization of the user equipment such as reducing battery drain.